Paolo Caracini

The Facade of the Taipei Performing Arts Center: Embracing Contradictions

Functionality_The building envelope consists of 3 primary materials corresponding to 3 levels of opacity: opaque aluminium for the theater’s hall volumes, transparent glass for the central cube containing support programs, perforated coated aluminum for the west towers.

David Gianotten Team Dedication

2008

The design brief, and especially the site, inspired us from day one. The Shilin Night Market was a heart of Taipei’s nightlife, and it had to be replaced by a performing arts center and make way for the city’s experimental theatre making, which was rapidly gaining international reputation. While Rem Koolhaas and I were visiting the site for the first time, we immediately understood that the vibrancy of the site and the vitality of the Taipei theater world presented a unique opportunity to do something that was never done before. We could combine the nightlife street culture with the highbrow experimental theater culture. In this way, we create a new cultural platform for the youth, the citizens, and the cultural professionals of Taipei and Taiwan. On the way back home to the Netherlands, we made the first sketches based on the idea of lifting the performing arts center above the night market and connecting both worlds. This idea has been guiding the project ever since then.

Chris Stowers

1/ In the beginning … this image of a surveyor was shot on my very first visit to the TPAC site on 27th December, 2012, then a cleared and sloping area with a small stream running through it that had been the location of the Shilin Food Market. I waited until the end of the shoot, when the sun was setting, so as to emphasise the engineer and his equipment by using offcamera lighting.

2/ Soon construction was going ahead full-steam. By my 4th full-site visit, on 18th November 2013, the job was to shoot major developments at TPAC, among them the installation of elements of the major support structure. I’ve always focused on the human aspect of a scene, and so, in perfect afternoon light, this shot of workers guiding giant I-beams into position caught my attention.

3/ Safety-first … this message was always drummed into any visitor to the construction site, especially in the early years when the structure was mostly exposed. I often had to work strapped into a safety harness, and shoot through safety goggles as sweat poured from beneath my plastic helmet. This worker – on 16th January, 2014 – caught my attention, balancing effortlessly on a beam 12 floors up: he managed to look heroic and safe, all at the same time!

4/ A moment of unintended humour during the first Inspection Tour I shot along with Rem and David, on 27th March, 2012. In this shot, Rem (left), Lin Chiaju (with her back to camera) and OMA architect Inge Goudsmit are discussing some aspect of the restroom colour scheme as David, seated on a recently installed toilet, seems to have a completely different observation that they need to hear!

5/ The OMA site office for many years was in a portacabin positioned on the edge of the compound just off of Jihe Road. This temporary accommodation soon became very lived-in, and I always loved to see the homely touches Chiaju and her colleagues would make, such as these pegs for holding the personal safety helmets of OMA team members, taken on 21st January, 2016. Many of the people named here became personal friends, and have now moved on to other projects around the world.